Facebook Bikini Pics Wind Up On Porn Sites...Again

It appears that Facebook photos keep making unwilling porn stars out of people, as a Singapore mom is incensed after pictures she uploaded to the site wound up on pop-up ads advertising various porn and dating sites. One of the sites that scraped her photo was a pay-per-minute phone sex service.

Jules Rahim was apparently notified by a friend, who spotted her image in this unwanted context. The situation only became more awkward as she was told just a few days later of another instance of her photo popping up to advertise porn. The photo in question (seen above) showed Rahim in a bikini, but "fully clothed" in terms of what constitutes "nudity" in more circumstances.

Of course, Rahim notified the police and has expressed her intentions to file harassment charges. All we can say is good luck.

First off, the sites that jacked her bikini shots from Facebook operate outside of Singapore - in Germany and the U.S. Cases like this are a jurisdictional nightmare. It's also clear that Facebook takes a "once you go public...well, it's public" stance on most content you share on the site. This is lifted straight from their terms of service:

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

When you publish content or information using the Public setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture).

Facebook doesn't allow nudity, so the fact that Rahim is non-nude in the eyes of the law coupled with her willingness to make her content public makes it a tough complaint to win.

This kind of Facebook photo scraping is not just a Singapore problem (although the StraitTimes says that Rahim isn't the only one as of late), but we've seen this in the U.S rather recently.

In February, over a dozen teenage girls from a Boston area high school were shocked to find that some of their Facebook photos had been used on various porn sites. Once again, the porn site was located in another country, and the girls had publicly displayed their profiles for the world to see. In this case, the affected group of girls contain some as young as 14. But the photos involved suggestive poses, not nudity. These kinds of cases walk these fine lines.